We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion

The first piece of news that I read was that Sam Bankman-Fried was responsible for Jeffrey Epstein's death. My feed used to feel more relevant and coherent than it did when I was a super- user. The prospect of a collapse of the platform felt like a tail-end risk in the first days after Musk's departure. It was presented as a moral necessity and righteous users who hated Musk would quit.

The mood on the app has been similar to 2 am in a dorm room just after the last joint has been smoked, when it is not clear whether the party is cresting or not. People try to keep up the fun by making themselves funnier. One friend bragged that he would be found in the woods without a phone. I will be thrilled.

Something is broken. Things are not holding together. The teams of engineers are no longer with us. On Sunday, a tool went rogue and began blocking thousands of accounts at a time. Anti-Semitic bots and so-called elite business professors are taking over my posts. The actors are desperate to target me, so it feels ominous.

It is becoming less funny and more frightening. I think that this grief is experienced by a lot of people. Most people, even analysts, are trapped talking about the demise of TWo as a liberation or as the gripping psycho drama of one bitter billionaire, his karmic comeuppance.

If we look at the influence of active users, we underestimate it a lot. It's a forge of public opinion. In political analysis, publishing, public health, foreign policy, economics, history, the study of race, even in business and finance, Twitter has come to drive who gets quotes in the press The person opines on the show. A person gets a show. It can determine who we consider an authority in foreign affairs. Even if they don't have an account, almost every academic and journalist has come to read it.

It is easy to calculate the economic value of a company based on reported ad revenue. There is a far, far more expansive realm beyond that. The intangible wealth now vested in its communities and in the sense that it offers to people of having a place in the world is what's encompassed by that. Humans cannot just be brought over to Mastodon. The amount of wealth that would be lost if the company went down is staggering. The investments in the world's biggest status bank are very vulnerable.

I said last week that I would love to see it die because of the terrible changes it had made to my field. Some of the worst changes in the existence of the press in America were made possible by the use of social media. I think the negative impact of social media on society is overstated.

The first thing we need to do is deal with the evil of the social media platform. The existing inequality in elites reached a new level. I was told in my field that I had to focus my work on the most popular accounts. The only thing that separated a piece of work that made no difference to the world and one that made a huge difference was a retweet. Last year, a top editor at Insider sent a memo to his writers telling them that their performance would be judged by their impact points, which would be determined in part by how much people talked to them on social media. This became the attitude of a lot of publications' executives, particularly lefty ones, who have been shown to rely more on social media than conservatives. Those with more than a million followers were referred to as huge. In order to get the attention of a small group of elite opinion makers, tens of thousands of American aspiring writers were publishing and using social media.

The authority once held by top editors at The New York Times has been lost. The difference is that once seated, these arbiters could not be deposed. Even if someone is demoted or fired from the elite, their followers will always come back. The general discourse is more static than it used to be. It's partly because of the social networking site.

The way in which the arbiters amassed their influence was frustratingly arbitrary. The Insider editor advised journalists to keep an eye out for a particular account run by Yashar Ali, who rose from his own praise of andDMs to blue check writers. He shot up to nearly 800,000 followers after his account had a blue check, and was named one of the most influential internet commentators by Time. Ali's uniquevulnerability has been praised.

If you read his feed, you will see that it is pretty much the same as any random person's. Andrew made the same comment a few days before Ali did. Ali is flooded with requests from journalists for their attention, which results in significant traffic increases.

The idea of "expertise" could be the cause of Twitter's death.

It came to be a prime way to land a gig. Jon says that most of his income is now generated with the help of the social network. When he published a book, he says, editors asked him to turn threads into stories, and he was invited to talk about it on TV. Sales were driven by those interviews. Sources trusted his blue check, which led to scoops. The one thing that he could point to was his Twitter account, where he had a lot of followers.

A lot of what is supposed to be new, fresh, non-mainstream opportunities for journalists are now dependent on their success on the social networking site. According to a WIRED analysis, the authors of the top 50 paid news and politics Substacks had an average of 387,046 followers when they launched their newsletter. According to Substack's CEOs, they decide who to recruit to the platform based on a method that analyzes writers' social media presences and assigns them between one and four fire emojis. In order to participate in Substack Pro, you'll need hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance.

The managing editor of the popular tech Substack "Platformer" wrote a year ago that "the only way a Substack grows is throughtweet"

It is not necessarily the worst thing, but it is the norm to report for no pay. The way in which the platform came to drive journalists' paid opportunities has made the impression that writers who want to get paid are the pawns of elites.

Some of the best news and analysis about the collapse of FTX, a crytocurrency exchange, has been gathered by an anonymous Twitter account. Someone has been running it all day and night.

Dozens of commenters begged the account's owner to keep it. It will only force you to change your narrative to the most profitable sectors.

One person advised to keep to your lane. Everyone who tries to increase their social media presence ends up in the business of clown chasing. The commenters was probably correct.

Those of us who have been spinning near the bottom of the funnel finding ourselves equal, again, with those who had gyrated at the top, initially felt exciting. The 2008 recession was similar to this one for status. Things will be destroyed when the bottom falls out.

It has been magic. The jokey mood may be a way to push away the awe of the truth. I read about the disappearance of two Malaysian planes, about Covid, and about the protests over the murder of George Floyd in that place.

I can only imagine what it would be like to follow the breaking-news events of the day on another platform. It is in these real once-in- history moments that we see the power of social media. It doesn't put people in circles like Facebook. There is a lower barrier to entry for people who want to contribute to the story. You don't have to angle for a photo or a video; you can hide under a desk, or even hand- write a message from prison.

People who are excited to see Musk fall on his face might not know what role the social networking site has in other countries. The political life of Zimbabwe, which is run by a repressive government that cracks down on physical protests and political speech, is now taking place on the social networking site. Tinashe is a Zimbabwean journalist. The anonymity of the app has allowed a discussion about the country that is critical.

The time is midnight to reconnoiter on Zimbabwean social media. That is when the cost of cell phone data goes down. Most Zimbabweans can't afford the amount of data that video- or image-laden apps use.

If the users with mere tens of thousands of followers branch out below the super- users, what will happen?

A famous Zimbabwean novelist claims that the internet is a parallel country. She told the interviewer that she had the safety of anonymity if she chose to. Most of the organizing in Zimbabwe now takes place at that location. It would not have been possible if activists had maderides there.

Politicians in Zimbabwe are forced to respond to public opinion on social media. It is possible for people who have been forced to flee the country to return to their homes on the social networking site. Many Zimbabweans waiting for asylum abroad can't work legally. People can't go home to bury their parents They are very prolific on the social networking site. They don't have a lot of other things to offer. It's a place for fantasy and despair. It's a place. He moved to the UK. He told me that there are parts of him that only exist on the social networking site.

Jeffrey Moyo was arrested for helping two New York Times reporters and was held for weeks in small prison cells with up to 25 other people. The prisoners didn't have enough room to roll over. He was separated from his wife and son and faced a hopelessly biased Zimbabwean judiciary.

One of Moyo's lawyers is very active on the social networking site. Moyo credits his lawyer with getting him released. He credits the social networking site with keeping his sanity. When Moyo was in jail, his lawyer would give him a rundown of what people were saying on the internet. Moyo says that he was given strength by those social media postings. I think I would have felt abandoned if it weren't for the social networking site. You hope that your family and friends will care if you are jailed. If strangershear of your situation, you feel a special strength because you don't know the man. I can tell that what he is doing is not right.

The Zimbabweans he knows on the social networking site are avoiding talking about what might happen if the app doesn't work. They don't like Musk's antics. He says that they don't have the right to leave. New platforms may not be able to re-create the established sense of community we have on there.

Moyo has been attentive. In the past few years, Twitter has worked hard to banBots that were bought by repressive regimes. Moyo was sad and frightened to see a certain kind of account reemerging after the advent of Musk. Some have returned with a blue check.

The unraveling of Bankman-Fried's sham can be seen in the fact that he was both made and unmade by the platform. An exhibit of her work embroidered onto handkerchiefs and doilies opened in September at a New York gallery and has sold for over $10,000. Whether or not you think her rise is justified by the quality of her work, there are thousands of writers who now depend on social media to promote their work. According to a WIRED analysis of a selection of posts by several users with less than 25,000 followers, a retweet by Molly Jong-Fast helped make that post one of their top-performingtweets of the year. There's a lot of liability.

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Think about how bad it was for the anti-vax advocates to be kicked off the social networking site. They were grifters, that's right. If it were to die, that would be all over the place. Hundreds of thousands of people's careers are now driven by a single social networking site. Many academics have enriched their professional networks by building popular audiences on the social networking site. The chatter on there has become essential.

We were taught things by the social networking site. We have learned that we can enter spaces where the gentry are speaking. We have learned that the way to be heard and make a difference is to amplify other ideas.

I think a lot of people are embarrassed to admit what they've come to think of the service. The ratio against him was very high. It's not cool to say you care about the social networking site. The comedian was accused of being a suck-up and being a cheapskate. I would pay a lot of money to kill the social networking site.

Political strategists and academics are trying to keep their followers from leaving the app. These appeals are usually couched as pleas for the sake of the community. They are often figures who have come to have thousands of readers because of their use of the social networking site. Their pleas are often ignored because they come off as shamefully status seeking. Many people are just pleading for money.

There is a virtual civilization that is shuddering. We are gradually being plunged into a kind of dark because a lot of the best reporting on what is going on atTwitter has been revealed by citizen journalists and employees of the app. I was told that the top topic in South Africa was about a brand that is not sold here. The news that Dan Quayle is the most popular person in Athens came as a shock to me.

Mike Pompeo was a topic of discussion in Rome. I think that's because his last name is Italian and no real minds exist at the social networking site to keep up with trends, like a downed electric line in a hellscape.

I was in elementary school when I learned about the Roman coliseum. It was built for games, reenactments, forums, and funerals. Most of the people who went there were ordinary people, not the elite. Exotic imported animals tore condemned men apart for onlookers' pleasure as Rome grew and became decadent. After Rome was sacked, the Colosseum was abandoned.

I now know that this isn't true. There was never an abandonment of the Colosseum. After the king of the Visigoths tore through Rome, animal hunts were still held there.

As central organization broke down, hawkers combed the stands to lure people to sideshows while craftsmen set up ad hoc shops a little like the way users are now directing their followers toward their accounts on other platforms. The prospect of a rapid demise of the social networking site is a fantasy at the moment. Users don't need to adjudicate for themselves at the point at which it becomes dangerous or useless because it's a fantasy.

The death fantasy also deprives us of the chance to think about what we would want to do to save the site. If we woke up one morning and it was gone, some of it would still be with us. In real life, the ways of relating and presumptions that are held true on social media seem to be true. The mores encapsulated and encouraged in the amphitheater bled out beyond the Colosseum's walls as a kind of violence became more acceptable in society. Donald Trump believes that all of his voters will come back to him, like followers will come back to you after a suspension. Bankman- Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, has said he intends to raise the $8 billion he needs to cover all of FTX's withdrawal requests in two weeks. To him, his investors weren't real. The usernames were used in the game.

We were taught things by the social networking site. We have learned that we can enter spaces where the gentry are speaking. We have learned that the best way to be heard and make a difference is to amplify other ideas instead of coming up with our own. Everything is shocking, unbelievable, unprecedented, and nothing really matters.

I was shown a link to a video of a flock of sheep in a circle when I refreshed my feed. It said "sign of the apocalypse" The sheep have been walking in a circle for 10 days without anyone knowing why. People may be able to understand why sheep do this. The sheep can get sick if it gets caught in a loop. They can get a glitch in their hive mind and start circling out of frustration. If he wanted to, there was a man who could stop the decline of the social networking site. We could think about what we want to save or re-create if we wanted to.

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